Not necessarily as a result of a pandemic, a scenario that might never happen, but rather because business is a confidence game that relies entirely on the emotional responses of investors and consumers.
The most obvious commercial victim of bird flu - imagined or real - is the multi-million pound poultry industry, which includes egg producers and broiler breeders, as well as those bringing the poultry to market; ranging from supermarkets to restaurants.
For the moment, this sector's most immediate concern is that talk of a possible pandemic will spook consumers.
"This is not a food safety issue," insists National Farmers' Union president Tim Bennett. "I am concerned that consumers are not getting a clear message that poultry is safe to eat."
Yet, early signs of a bird flu impact on companies are already appearing.
Two months ago, when the British Veterinary Association said it was "inevitable" that wild birds would eventually carry bird flu to Britain, there was a "blip in sales" of poultry, Mr Bennett observes.
On Thursday this week, Northern Foods' finance director Jez Maiden warned that chicken pies and ready meals are about to become dearer, since the "uncertainties over avian flu... has a tendency to push up the price of chicken we buy in the UK".
And a few weeks ago, Dutch authorities ordered free range chickens be moved indoors.
Rural risks
There are also concerns that Europe's rural economy could be hit beyond any suffering endured by the poultry sector.
The bird trade is not limited to the poultry industry - Europe is also the world's largest market for the legal trade in wild birds, including hunting falcons and hawks.
This sector should expect tighter controls going forward, given the likelihood that wild birds carry the virus.
In parts of Russia, bans on bird shoots have been introduced and concerns about the flu spreading from wild birds could spark calls for similar measures elsewhere in Europe.
Moreover, as happened during the UK's foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, tourists could grow wary about visiting rural areas or even entire countries where the virus has been detected - such as Turkey, where bird flu was detected in turkeys on Thursday.
"Turkey is surprisingly close. It is where many of us will take our holidays," Peter Barton, an East Sussex free range chicken farmer concerned about the virus spreading to his birds, tells BBC News.
Turkey is already worried about the health of its lucrative tourism industry, which is growing at more than 10% a year and forecasts predict it will bring in more than $20bn in foreign currency earnings by 2007.
Agriculture minister Mehdi Eder - painfully aware of how fickle tourists respond instantly to health concerns, whether real or imaginary - has urged the media to report the problem in a responsible manner.
Indeed, it appears bird flu fears have had no significant impact on the tourism industry. Detached investors are not deserting the sector, and neither are consumers.
Take Germany, where travellers tend to be very quick to respond to perceived threats - Europe's second largest travel operator Thomas Cook predicts holiday sales growth in Germany to dip this winter to between 2% and 4%, but attributes the weakness to high oil prices and weak consumer confidence, not to concerns about avian flu.
Contingency plans
Business travellers are also still out there, though here the picture is gradually becoming more nuanced.
Some firms have started supplying staff travelling to Asia and other affected areas with anti-viral drugs that are effective against the H5N1 avian flu strain causing concern at the moment, and several corporations are preparing plans for how and when travel by staff members should be limited.
A rapidly growing number of multinational corporations - including global banks such as Deutsche Bank, HSBC and UBS - are also hammering out detailed contingency plan, including repatriation routines for their workers should the virus mutate into a form where it poses a serious threat to human health.
Some global operators are also working out ways to serve both customer and internal requirements electronically, using the internet and call centres to maintain business should customers and staff cut back on their travel.
Waiting list
The pharmaceutical group Roche is among the global giants that have contingency plans in place.
"We need to make sure we can maintain our business, so we have our own pandemic plan within Roche," spokeswoman Susie Hackett tells BBC News.
Ms Hackett declines to elaborate on the plan's details, but Roche's efforts are believed to include supplies of its Tamiflu anti-viral drug for members of staff, some of whom would be considered "essential workers" should a pandemic occur.
Other companies eager to stockpile either Roche's Tamiflu drug or GlaxoSmitkline's equivalent Relenza, are finding it difficult to do so since there is a worldwide shortage of the drug.
"Several companies have approached us," says Ms Hackett.
But government requirements are dealt with first to make sure the public at large is looked after.
"We are managing our stock levels very carefully and there is a waiting list among companies," says Ms Hackett.
Roche has scaled up its production of Tamiflu significantly in recent months, and this should lead to an eightfold increase in output by next summer when compared with 2004, says Ms Hackett.
Depending on the severity of the annual ordinary flu season, some stock might be released to private companies early next year, she says.
Companies insist their preparations are nothing out of the ordinary, and that they are getting ready 'just-in-case', just as they would prepare contingency plans for natural disasters and terrorist attacks.
And primary care expert Dr Nigel Higgins is among those in the medical profession who agrees that whereas "we do not need to panic, we need to be prepared".
The possibility that bird flu could already be present in Britain is being studied by Government vets who are investigating whether the potentially lethal strain contaminated a quarantine "facility" in Essex much earlier than thought.
As vets investigated how H5N1 influenza came to infect a parrot from South America, which is unaffected by this strain, the European Union, the world's biggest importer of wildfowl, said it was ready to propose a temporary ban on imports.
The H5N1 virus - which has only so far infected those working closely with infected birds - can be lethal and of 120 confirmed cases, around 60 people in south-east Asia have died. Experts fear that a mutation of the H5N1 strain or a blend with a human flu could create a pandemic.
On Sunday, the Government announced that its "working hypothesis" was that a Surinam parrot in the Ess
ex facility was infected with H5N1 by one of a second batch of birds from Taiwan.
However, Taiwan has not reported any domestic cases of H5N1. "The British authorities do not have solid evidence," said Yeh Ying, deputy director of Taiwan's Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine, adding that speculation was "very dangerous and irresponsible".
And a Government vet admitted yesterday that he could not rule out the possibility that the facility, run by a commercial bird importer, had become contaminated by an earlier import. One or more birds in an earlier batch could have had a "subclinical" infection, so the birds appeared free of disease. However, as a result of the stress of quarantine, they could have excreted virus.
The facility is supposed to be disinfected or fumigated between batches but it is possible that contaminated droppings remained to crumble and release airborne virus that could have infected subsequent batches of birds from Taiwan and South America. "That is a possibility. All that is being investigated," said the vet.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is checking a consignment of birds that arrived "some time ago" to trace how the infection became established.
"We are looking at what went into the quarantine before," the vet said. "We are carefully checking our facts and cross-checking them. It is quite complicated because we are being faced with some conflicting reports."
If an earlier batch had been contaminated, the Government vet said he would have expected other cases of bird flu to have become apparent by now, given the three- to five-day incubation period.
"We have absolutely no evidence that the quarantine period has failed," he stressed, adding that "sentinel birds" - British hens susceptible to the virus kept in the quarantine facility - had not shown signs of avian influenza.
The chief vet, Debby Reynolds, has admitted that some of the Taiwanese birds had died in quarantine before Oct 16 and yet they were only now being tested. "There are quite a number of unanswered questions," she added.
Yesterday, another senior Government vet said there was confusion about when samples from the birds were submitted for testing, which birds died and when they died. When asked why the Taiwanese birds were not tested when they died, he said: "I don't know."
A VILLAGE sparked its second national public health scare in five years yesterday as the first case of the deadly avian flu virus found in Britain was traced to a private bird importer.
Little Warley, Essex, is home to Pegasus Birds, a tropical bird specialist which is thought to be linked to the quarantine centre where a parrot carrying the lethal H5N1 strain of the disease died on October 16.
The shop is opposite the abattoir that reported the first case of foot-and-mouth disease in the 2001 outbreak.
Brett Hammond, the owner of Pegasus Birds, was convicted of VAT fraud and jailed for 18 months at Knightsbridge Crown Court in February 1997. The sentence was reduced to 12 months on appeal. He also featured in a BBC Radio 4 investigation about the importation of wild cockatoos from Indonesia that were sold in Britain as captive reared birds, which command higher prices.
Last night government vets confirmed they are investigating the possibility that H5N1 was present at the facility much earlier than thought.
On Sunday it announced its "working hypothesis" was that the bird had been infected by a batch of birds from Taiwan.
But yesterday authorities in Taiwan said there had been no reports of cases of H5N1 on the island and the British Government’s theory had no "solid evidence" to back it up.
An alternative possibility is that birds in an earlier batch delivered to the facility could have had a "subclinical" infection and began secreting virus only after the stresses of quarantine. Contaminated droppings could have released the airborne virus that may have infected subsequent batches of birds from Taiwan and South America.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is now looking at what went into the quarantine before the parrot’s arrival.
Although Defra refused to disclose the location of the avian flu case, the commuter belt village came under suspicion. Little Warley, just east of the M25, is home to numerous pet centres, kennels, catteries and aquariums, as well as farms and expensive gated homes.
Mr Hammond could not be contacted at his home in Upminster, near the centre, yesterday. Katrin Geller, his partner, said he was not in the house when The Times called.
She subsequently denied that Mr Hammond lived in the house. When asked if she could confirm that the parrot had died at Pegasus Birds, however, she said: "Defra have told us not to say anything to you about that."
Staff at the Pegasus Centre, which is the biggest importer of birds and reptiles in Essex, denied that the parrot had died there after a transfer from Heathrow. The bird originated from Surinam, South America, and entered the country in a consignment of 148 birds on September 16.
Eleven days later a batch of 218 birds from Taiwan were also moved into the quarantine premises and two parrots were found dead last Thursday. Only one was found to contain the suspect H5 strain, though further tests on tissue samples from both birds confirmed the H5N1 strain.
Debby Reynolds, the Government’s chief veterinary adviser, confirmed that the birds had been kept in Essex and had shared air space.
The head of the World Health Organisation says the developed world must help poorer countries stem a possible flu pandemic by making anti-viral drugs available and sharing information and expertise.
A two-day international conference in the Canadian capital Ottawa aimed to forge a coordinated international effort against the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus.
"We must find ways of helping developing countries," Lee Jong-Wook, the WHO's director general told health ministers and experts from 30 countries.
"Each country should have access to anti-viral medication, whether procured independently or provided through international collaboration in a stockpile."
The delegates discussed ways to advance global preparations for a flu pandemic and enhance global collaboration and coordination.
Mr Lee called for improved surveillance and early warning systems in all affected and at-risk countries.
"All countries need to be able to detect, investigate, and report cases without delay. That information has to be quickly produced and shared freely among the international community," he said.
Focus on Asia
Meanwhile in Denmark, a key WHO official said Europe was well placed to combat the deadly strain of the virus.
"Ground zero in the war against avian influenza is Asia, not Europe, and Europe has an excellent chance of containing the virus," doctor Gudjon Magnusson from the WHO's Europe division said.
The highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of bird flu found in birds in South-East Asia has been identified in four countries in WHO's 52-member European region: Britain, Romania, Russia and Turkey.
"Through adequate preparedness and action Europe can avoid the situation we see in Asia," Mr Magnusson said.
"Though there are countries in our region that have been affected, the 118 cases of humans diagnosed with the disease so far have all been in South-East Asia, none in Europe."
So far about 60 people have died, all in Asia, primarily people who were in direct contact with infected poultry.
Mr Magnusson was heading a meeting in Copenhagen of the WHO, the European Commission and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to discuss measures to prevent a possible influenza pandemic in Europe.
"This meeting is not an emergency meeting. It is part of our ongoing cycle of preparedness to make sure all European countries have the tools and best preparedness possible to prevent a human pandemic," Mr Magnusson said.
Wild bird ban
The European Commission will this week propose a temporary ban on imports of wild birds from the rest of the world, EU health commissioner Markos Kyprianou said.
The EU's executive arm has been considering action after Britain called for a blanket ban on the import of exotic birds upon finding the deadly strain of bird flu in a quarantined parrot at the weekend.
The proposal will also be discussed during a meeting of the EU food security committee in Brussels on Tuesday.
The EU already has bird import bans in place for Romania, Russia, Thailand and Turkey, countries which have had confirmed cases of H5N1.
It is also preparing a similar ban for Croatia, where a bird flu outbreak was announced on Friday, with results pending for the H5N1 strain.
Russia, which has had several outbreaks of H5N1, reported at the weekend bird flu of an as-yet-undetermined type in a second area west of the Urals mountains.
Germany on Saturday began enforcing a temporary ban on outdoor poultry-rearing with spot checks on farms and fines for violations.
Egypt begins tests
Egypt has begun testing domestic and migratory birds for avian flu along its northern Mediterranean coast, the official MENA news agency said.
During the northern-hemisphere Autumn migrating wild birds fly from eastern and southern Europe over Egypt to seek warmer temperatures.
Lake Manzala is the most important wetland for wintering waterbirds in Egypt.
Egypt has called off the bird-hunting season this year and next in response to the global bird flu scare.
Authorities have set up observation posts along the country's borders and territorial waters to collect statistics about migratory birds potentially infected with the virus.
Imports of live birds and poultry products have been banned.
Oct. 25 (Bloomberg) -- European governments may need to use their armies to protect stashes of bird flu treatments from looting should there be a human outbreak of the deadly illness, a World Health Organization expert said in an interview.
The drugs need to be prescribed shortly after flu symptoms appear and governments should create small stockpiles around each country, said Guenael Rodier, special adviser on communicable diseases to the Geneva-based WHO in Europe. However, splitting up the stocks may make them vulnerable to raids by citizens desperate for protection from the virus, he said yesterday in Copenhagen.
``There's a risk that some of the stocks would be taken over by the populations,'' said Rodier, who has advised the U.S. on dealing with infectious illnesses and who spent last week in Romania tracking how that government dealt with a bird flu outbreak. ``You could use the military'' to secure the drugs, he said.
Governments have ramped up purchases of Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline Plc's Relenza after an Avian flu virus that has killed 61 people in Asia entered Europe. Experts say they are concerned the virus may mutate into a form that will trigger a global flu pandemic that may kill millions of people.
The H5N1 virus that's ravaged Asia and spread through Russia and China into Turkey and Romania has similarities with the so- called Spanish flu of 1918, according to research published in the journals Nature and Science on Oct. 5. Another such outbreak is a certainty, said Denis Coulombier, head of preparedness and planning at the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
`One Day'
``What we know is that it will happen one day,'' Coulombier said at a press conference yesterday. ``It's difficult to say whether it will be a severe pandemic like with the Spanish flu.''
Representatives of European countries are meeting at a WHO conference in Copenhagen to produce recommendations on how to cope with bird flu and what preparations they can make in the event that the virus becomes transferable between humans.
Antivirals such as Tamiflu may be the only drugs available to combat a pandemic because vaccines won't be developed until 6 months after the disease has appeared. By that time the worst of the first wave of cases will have passed, Rodier said. Vaccines may be effective later against recurrences of the illness, which may continue for two years after the initial outbreak, he said.
At the moment bird flu poses a danger to the EU's 14.5 billion-euro ($17.4 million) poultry industry rather than its human population. The EU's two biggest publicly traded poultry processors, Amersfoort, Netherlands-based Nutreco NV and Sable-sur- Sarthe, France-based LDC SA, said separately last week that sales of chicken and turkey meat had plunged as much as 10 percent after the discovery of the H5N1 virus in Romania.
``We will be stuck with this disease for many years,'' said Willem Droppers, an adviser to the World Organization for Animal Health, in an interview in Copenhagen. Governments can do little to tackle the threat of further outbreaks caused by migrating birds, he said.
Ottawa, Canada (dpa) - With a sense of urgency as bird flu spreads westward from Asia, world health leaders meeting for the first time in Canada are grappling with a two front war.
There's the effort to keep the disease from spreading among birds and animals, already at full tilt in many countries, especially Asia and in the last weeks in Europe. And there's the creeping worldwide fear that the H5N1 virus could mutate and become contagious among humans.
Health ministers from 30 countries and leaders of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the international Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) kicked off a two-day meeting Monday on the global fight against avian flu.
They stressed that international cooperation was key to containing the deadly bird flu virus that has killed hundreds of millions of wild and domestic fowl - and more than 60 people.
But uppermost in many remarks was the worry about the shortage of antiviral medicines and vaccines.
Only 40 countries have plans in place for a global pandemic, said Jong-Wook Lee, WHO's director-general. He warned at the opening session at Canada's Foreign Ministery that the next global human flu pandemic "could appear at any time" and would likely stem from avian flu.
Mexico called for richer countries to help poorer in developing a vaccine and producing antiviral medicines to take if the illness starts spreading among people.
"Many middle income countries have the capacity to produce vaccines - we don't have to start from zero," Mexico's Health Minister Julio Frenk told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in a telephone interview.
Frenk has also asked that wealthy countries set aside antiviral drugs for use by poorer nations in the event of a pandemic. Lee however seemed skeptical that when push came to shove during an outbreak countries would actually be willing to give some of their antivirals to help others in need.
In the interview, Frenk said countries such as Mexico, Brazil and India could greatly contribute to the global effort to come up with a vaccine to protect people against a human version of bird flu - if they got pointers from more scientifically-advanced countries.
Only nine countries currently have the capacity to develop and produce a vaccine targeting the lethal H5N1 strain of avian flu that has led to mass culls of poultry in Asia and parts of Eastern Europe, according to Frenk.
The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has caused "concern" in the international public health community for its reluctance to allow generic versions of its antiviral drug Tamiflu to be produced, one official said.
"The international community is concerned about that," said Ujjal Dosanjh, Canada's health minister, on his way into the meeting. "In Canada, we respect the intellectual property but we also have regulations that in an emergency we have the mechanism to deal with that kind of an issue very quickly."
Earlier Monday, Roche cautioned countries against producing their own generic versions of the drug Tamiflu, which has been shown to lessen the effects of flu in humans. Roche holds the patent until 2016, but late last week agreed to meet with four pharmaceutical companies that said they had the capacity to produce the drug.
Taiwan's Health Minister told reporters in Taiwan on Monday that Roche had indicated it would discuss the issue of possible production in Taiwan. But it said it was laying the legal groundwork to produce Tamiflu without Roche's permission if the country suffers a serious outbreak before receiving a production license, Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA) reported.
But there was a danger of "over-medicalizing" the threat, WHO's Lee said.
Jacques Diouf, head of the international Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), warned that "we shouldn't forget about the fact that it's still just an animal disease".
"We need to make sure that these conditions under which animals mix with humans" receive more attention, he said. "I think it's not one or the other, it has to be both."
Efforts will be made at the gathering to reach out to countries - especially those in Southeast Asia - that are largely rural and poor, officials said. Canada recently launched a five-year project to increase the ability of public health systems in Southeast Asia and China to detect and effectively respond to infectious diseases such as bird flu.
The United States has also pledged funds for this purpose.
"We need a rapid and clear plan of what is happening," Lee said. "I believe this is the time to act."
Health Minister Tony Abbott says there'll almost certainly be a bird flu pandemic.
Mr Abbott, who is meeting with health ministers in the Canadian capital Ottawa to discuss bird flu, said it was important that all nations took the threat seriously.
"There will almost certainly be a pandemic at some stage," Mr Abbott told Southern Cross Broadcasting.
"But whether it will be next month, next year, or next decade, we just don't know.
"We do know that there have been three pandemics in the last 100 years.
"The first in 1918-19 was very, very serious indeed. It killed, perhaps, 50 million people around the world, including about 12,000 people in Australia.
"The two subsequent pandemics in the late 1950s and the late 1960s were much less severe. They killed about a million people each around the world, including about 500 each in Australia."
Mr Abbott said the risk of a human strain of bird flu was greatest in south and east Asia which did not keep as careful a watch on poultry flocks as Australia.
Opposition health spokeswoman Julia Gillard said the shortage of health workers would limit Australia's ability to handle a bird flu outbreak.
She said a proposed move by the federal health department to bring retired doctors and nurses out of retirement in the case of a bird flu epidemic was a short-term political fix.
"The Howard government must invest in training more doctors and nurses and look at better ways of retaining health professionals," Ms Gillard said.
"If Mr Abbott intends on relying on retired doctors and nurses he should put to the Australian community exactly how he intends on doing that.
"Tony Abbott should also explain why he is contemplating bringing doctors and nurses out of retirement and if he actually has a long-term plan to reverse the shortage his government has created."
Russia has confirmed more bird flu cases, raising fears it could spread over Europe, but a UN official says the best way to stop it was for donors to pay up and fight it where it began, among Asian fowl.
The latest case in Russia killed 12 hens at a private dacha in Tambov, 400km southeast of Moscow, last week.
The authorities culled 53 ducks and hens and imposed a quarantine. Tests confirmed it was the H5N1 avian flu strain which can infect humans, though not yet pass between them, officials said.
The European Union was poised to ban all imports of captive wild birds after a parrot died of H5N1 in quarantine in Britain.
Asian scare
China meanwhile reported an outbreak of bird flu among poultry in the eastern province of Anhui, the Agriculture Ministry and an international group for animal health said on Tuesday.
A report to the World Organisation for Animal Health, posted on the group's website, said the outbreak was found among chickens and geese in Anhui. It said 140,000 birds had been vaccinated and that quarantines and other precautions were taken.
"Yes, there is an outbreak of bird flu in Anhui. I cannot give any details now," said an official at the Agriculture Ministry.
Indonesia's Health Ministry said on Tuesday that testing had confirmed a man who died in September was positive for bird flu, taking the number of deaths from the virus in the country to four.
Hariadi Wibisono, a senior official at the ministry, said a total of three other Indonesians had also fallen sick from the virus but had survived.
He said the latest results were from tests obtained on Monday and verified by the World Health Organisation.
Containment
More dead birds were found and taken for tests in Germany, Croatia, Hungary and Portugal as suspect cases multiplied. But the numbers involved in Europe are still small and no humans there have been infected, unlike Asia where 61 people died after close contact with infected birds.
A World Health Organisation official from Asia said Europe still had good prospects of stopping H5N1 reaching its tame bird population because it had reacted faster and more openly.
"There is an excellent chance for Europe to contain the Asian flu," said Shigeru Omi.
The UN food agency's head said the world must focus on Asia, and on stopping the virus passing between birds, as the best way to prevent the nightmare scenario of it mixing with a human strain to cause pandemic deadly flu.
Human contamination
"Too much time has gone by and even now we seem to focus more on addressing a possible pandemic which is spread from human to human," said Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
"It's good to be ready should this happen. But for the time being we have 140 million birds killed or dying or have died because of avian influenza, with $10 billion of costs ... and it is still there (in Asia) that we are having contamination to human beings," he told Reuters in an interview in Canada.
He said the FAO had helped develop a $175 million strategy to control H5N1, which surfaced in South Korea two years ago, and had received pledges of $30 million in aid - but donors had not yet handed over a single cent.
US health officials, meanwhile, said on Monday they feared counterfeiters would try to cash in on the demand for Tamiflu, one of the few drugs that can treat bird flu, and said they were putting into effect measures to prevent this.
The US Food and Drug Administration said it would work to help researchers and companies develop new flu drugs that might treat H5N1 and to work quickly to approve them.
Carried by migratory birds, H5N1 has now moved west as far as European Russia, Turkey and Romania.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia confirmed more bird flu cases on Monday, raising fears it could spread over Europe, but a U.N. official said the best way to stop it was for donors to pay up and fight it where it began, among Asian fowl.
The latest case in Russia killed 12 hens at a private dacha in Tambov, 400 km (250 miles) southeast of Moscow, last week. Authorities culled 53 ducks and hens and imposed a quarantine.
Tests confirmed it was the H5N1 avian flu strain which can infect humans, though not yet pass between them, officials said.
The European Union was poised to ban all imports of captive wild birds after a parrot died of H5N1 in quarantine in Britain.
More dead birds were found and taken for tests in Croatia, Hungary and Portugal as suspect cases multiplied.
But the numbers involved in Europe are still small and no humans there have been infected, unlike Asia where 61 people died after close contact with infected birds.
A World Health Organization official from Asia said Europe still had good prospects of stopping H5N1 reaching its tame bird population because it had reacted faster and more openly.
"There is an excellent chance for Europe to contain the Asian flu," said Shigeru Omi.
The U.N. food agency's head said the world must focus on Asia, and on stopping the virus passing between birds, as the best way to prevent the nightmare scenario of it mixing with a human strain to cause pandemic deadly flu.
"Too much time has gone by and even now we seem to focus more on addressing a possible pandemic which is spread from human to human," said Jacques Diouf, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
"It's good to be ready should this happen. But for the time being we have 140 million birds killed or dying or have died because of avian influenza, with $10 billion of costs ... and it is still there (in Asia) that we are having contamination to human beings," he told Reuters in an interview in Canada.
He said the FAO had helped develop a $175 million strategy to control H5N1, which surfaced in South Korea two years ago, and had received pledges of $30 million in aid -- but donors had not yet handed over a single cent.
WESTWARDS
Carried by migratory birds, H5N1 has now moved west as far as European Russia, Turkey and Romania.
"If, as we think, migratory birds will be one of the ways by which avian influenza is spreading around the world we can expect ... the problem in the Near East, in East and West Africa and naturally in North America and South America," said Diouf.
Croatia said it would cull more poultry after finding two more dead wild swans suspected of having an avian flu strain in a rural area where flu was found last week. The strain has yet to be identified.
Several geese and seagulls found dead north of Lisbon, in a fishing port where migrating birds are common, were being tested for flu, Portugal said.
Countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa have taken steps to try to stop migrating birds mixing with domestic fowl.
To close one possible channel of infection, the European Commission proposed a temporary ban on imports of wild fowl as pets. Veterinary experts will decide on Tuesday.
Fernand Sauer, director of public health and risk assessment at the European Commission, said confusion between different types of influenza was to blame for an exaggerated fear in Europe about the risks, which had reached hysteria.
ASIA
Countries that have already suffered from flu outbreaks were redoubling their efforts to stop its return.
North Korea said mechanisms were in place to eliminate "any slight symptoms in time", using its experience from an outbreak of a different strain earlier this year when more than 200,000 chickens were destroyed and 1.1 million poultry vaccinated.
A report that China would close its borders if it detected human-to-human transmission of bird flu unsettled Hong Kong stocks, with shares in hotels, retailers and airlines sliding.
An Australian firm said on Monday it was confident a vaccine it was testing in humans could protect against a pandemic form of the H5N1 virus unless it undergoes major genetic changes.
CSL Ltd, the world's largest maker of blood plasma products, has begun human vaccine trials using different dosages and hopes to know results by February.
Avian influenza has spread to more than half of Thailand, with 39 provinces reporting confirmed or suspected cases of fresh bird-flu infections.
Last week, the authorities had just 21 provinces under close watch for bird flu, suggesting the virus is spreading rapidly, Thai newspaper the Nation said on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, provinces of Kanchanaburi, Nakhon Pathom, Nonthaburi, Suphan Buri and Kamphaeng Phet have been put on a list of provinces with severe bird-flu problems.
"We are receiving more and more reports of fowl deaths," Jatuporn Kamchuen, the livestock chief of Kanchanaburi's Phanom Thuan district, said Monday. Livestock officials were busy culling fowl suspected of contracting bird flu.
At the same time, he complained that officials were facing resistance from some villagers who had tried to prevent officials from taking their birds. "We need to raise people's understanding of the situation."
Last week, two residents of Phanom Thuan district became the latest confirmed bird-flu patients in the country. One has died.
As of Monday, three others in Kanchanaburi were on a list of people suspected of catching bird flu. Kanchanaburi public-health chief Surapong Tanthanasrikul said health volunteers were going to areas, where bird-flu infections had been reported to check whether the disease had spread to any other people.
Samart Prasitphol, a senior livestock official in Kanchanaburi, said staff had set up checkpoints to enforce the ban on the movement of birds as a measure to curtail the spread of the deadly disease.
In Kamphaeng Phet, provincial public-health chief Wittaya Supornphan said all community hospitals across the province had been instructed to form teams at the provincial, district, and tambon levels to work round-the-clock in case a report of human infection arises.
"They must provide medical supplies, test kits and protective clothing to personnel who have to work with patients suspected of catching bird flu," Wittaya said.
He added that state and private hospitals were working closely with local administrative bodies to control the outbreak.
In Nakhon Pathom, Dr Pinij Hiranchote, director of the provincial hospital, disclosed that there was a suspected case of human-infection in the central province.
"We have kept him under close medical supervision," he said.
In Phitsanulok, provincial livestock chief Wannee Santamanas said more than 3,400 fowl had been culled in Bang Rakam district alone after some died suspiciously en masse.
"We are now waiting for the lab-test results," she said.
Public Health Minister Suchai Charoenratanakul said there were only 12 laboratories outside Bangkok that could determine within 24 hours whether a person has caught bird flu. He has instructed the Medical Sciences Department to set up mobile labs, which could be sent to conduct tests in areas where outbreaks of bird flu have been reported.
Paijit Warachit, who heads the department, said the mobile labs should be ready to begin operations within 10 days. "We plan to dispatch the mobile labs to Kanchanaburi and Kamphaeng Phet first, " he said.
Source: Xinhua
OTTAWA, Oct 24 (Reuters) - Fear of a bird flu pandemic among people has hampered efforts to prevent the spread of an outbreak among birds, and donor nations have dragged their heels on promises of millions of dollars in aid, the head of the United Nations food agency said on Monday.
Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, said many people seemed more focused on a possible human pandemic than on containing the outbreak, which started almost two years ago in South-East Asia.
Diouf said the FAO had first raised the alarm about bird flu in late 2003 when the disease was limited to China, Vietnam and Thailand. Since then it has killed around 60 people in the region and moved to parts of Europe, triggering fears it could start spreading from human to human and kill millions.
"Certainly too much time has gone by and even now we seem to focus more on addressing a possible pandemic which is spread from human to human," Diouf said in an interview with Reuters and Reuters Television.
"It's normal to do that and it's good to be ready should this happen. But for the time being we have 140 million birds killed or dying or have died because of avian influenza, with $10 billion of costs ... and it is still there (in Asia) that we are having contamination to human beings."
Diouf was in Ottawa for the start of a two day conference of health ministers and officials from 30 countries to discuss how ready the world is to fight a human influenza pandemic.
Diouf said the FAO and the World Organization for Animal Health had developed a detailed $175 million strategy for controlling avian flu in birds.
So far the FAO has only received pledges of aid totaling around $30 million and donors have not yet handed over a single cent.
"There is awareness and there is willingness and commitment to assist but I will judge when I receive the results (of appeals for aid) and so far I have not received them," he said.
He said putting more money into the fight against the spread of bird flu would enable impoverished nations to pay farmers for any animals which had to be slaughtered.
"We also would encourage that resources be allocated to compensate those poor farmers -- and most of them are poor farmers -- who are raising these poultry ... and who, if they are not given the right incentive, will tend to hide what is happening," Diouf said.
"Otherwise the (local) administration will come and kill their animals," he added. He said donor money could also be spent on boosting underfunded veterinarian and health services in affected areas.
Another region in European Russia confirmed an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus on Monday and Croatia said it would cull more poultry after finding two dead wild swans.
"If, as we think, migratory birds will be one of the ways by which avian influenza is spreading around the world we can expect ... the problem in the Near East, in East and West Africa and naturally in North America and South America," said Diouf.
A fourth person has died in Indonesia from bird flu, the World Health Organisation and the health ministry said.
Health ministry official Renuizar Rusin said the latest bird flu victim died in Bogor, south of Jakarta. He did not say when the person died.
"We have now seven cases of bird flu, including four fatalities," he said.
The WHO raised Indonesia's human death toll from bird flu to four on its website.
Meanwhile China has reported a new outbreak of bird flu in which 2,100 geese and chickens were infected, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said.
The outbreak was detected on October 20 in Liangying village in the eastern province of Anhui, according to a Chinese Ministry of Agriculture report to the OIE.
So far 550 birds have died and 44,736 have been culled.
In Canada the head of the World Health Organisation has told a gathering of health ministers and experts from 30 countries that they must help poorer countries to stem a possible flu pandemic.
"We must find ways of helping developing countries," Lee Jong-Wook, director general of the World Health Organization, told delegates in Ottawa.
"Each country should have access to anti-viral medication, whether procured independently or provided through international collaboration in a stockpile."
Mexico and Thailand had proposed wealthy countries share five to 10 percent of their flu vaccine stockpiles with developing countries, a plan "wholeheartedly endorsed" by Canada.
But Lee said the amount was insufficient.
The world will need to produce billions of doses of a safe vaccine when the time comes to fight a pandemic, he said.
Canadian Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh offered support for a plan to loosen drug patent laws to allow generic production of anti-viral drugs and vaccines in some countries.
"We actually need to assist them with technology transfers which I believe is a euphemism for loosening the patent laws," Mr Dosanjh said.
But, Lee noted: "It's not easy to break the patent."
Existing supplies of Tamiflu, an anti-viral drug effective against influenza, are inadequate and seasonal flu vaccine producers can only make enough for current demand, which is "a fraction" of what would be needed in a pandemic, Lee said.
"But, it is not the case that if we can break the patent we can produce the medicine in big quantities. The cooperation of (Tamiflu-maker) Roche is very important," he said, hopeful the company would share its license.
"When there is a real need for Tamiflu, the basic instinct will be: 'This is for our people' and it is a very unnatural act to share precious small quantities of medicine with others," he said.
"But, clearly it makes a lot of sense to try to put out the fire there rather than to wait for it to reach you."
The two-day international conference in Canada's capital aims to forge a coordinated international effort against the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus and advance global preparations for a flu pandemic.
A Chinese vendor weighs a basket of ducks for his customers in a market in Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu province. (Reuters)JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Indonesian authorities on Tuesday confirmed the country's fourth human death from bird flu, while China reported an outbreak of the virus among poultry in its eastern Anhui province.
The latest Indonesian victim, a 23-year-old man from Bogor, West Java, was hospitalized in late September and died two days later, said Hariadi Wibisono, a Ministry of Health official. A Hong Kong lab confirmed the test results on Monday, he and a World Health Organization official said.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu has swept through poultry populations in many parts of Asia since 2003, jumping to humans and killing more than 60 people.
Most human cases have been linked to contact with sick birds.
A report to the World Organization for Animal Health said the Chinese outbreak was found among chickens and geese on Oct. 20 in Anhui. It said 140,000 birds had been vaccinated and that quarantines and other precautions were taken.
"Yes, there is an outbreak of bird flu in Anhui. I cannot give any details now," said an official at the Agriculture Ministry who gave only his surname, Yu.
Days earlier, another new outbreak of the disease was found in the northern Chinese region of Inner Mongolia. Some 2,600 chickens and ducks were found dead at a breeding facility, sparking fears that humans were at risk of being sickened.
The latest bird flu developments in Asia came a day after a senior U.N. official said greater measures must be taken to stamp out bird flu in the region's flocks as health ministers from around the world met in Canada to discuss how to tackle a possible pandemic if the virus mutates and becomes easily transmitted between humans.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization plans to launch a "military-like" campaign, including house-to-house searches for infected birds, to tackle bird flu in Indonesia, saying a similar move in Thailand was successful.
"The serious bird flu situation in Indonesia, where several human death cases have been recorded recently, requires a strong coordinated response involving all players from the national level down to the many districts and local communities," Joseph Domenech, FAO's chief veterinary officer, said in a statement released Monday.
"FAO will bring in a team of experienced Thai veterinarians to share their experience with Indonesian animal health experts and to train hundreds of animal health technicians," said Peter Roeder, an animal health officer who will head the FAO team in Indonesia. "We believe that Indonesia can learn a lot from the Thai experience."
Health experts met Monday in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, to review European readiness for a possible human flu pandemic after the H5N1 bird flu strain spread from Asia to Russia, Turkey and Romania.
The FAO's head, Dr. Jacques Diouf, said in Canada on Monday that countries must not overlook the goal of controlling bird flu in Southeast Asia while being preoccupied with the development of antiviral drugs for humans.
"As the world takes prudent measures to prepare for a major human pandemic, greater measures must be taken to stop this disease, in its tracks, at its source, in animals," Diouf said. "This is very possible. It can be done."
Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization's director for the Western Pacific region, told a meeting of health experts in Denmark on Monday that Europeans had a "golden opportunity" to learn from the successes and failures of efforts to contain the virus in Asia.
"Asia remains ground zero in the war on avian flu and still represents the most serious risk to global public health," Omi told reporters. (AP)
JAKARTA, Oct 25 (Reuters) - Indonesia confirmed on Tuesday a fourth person in the country had succumbed to bird flu while China said hundreds of farm geese had died, the latest outbreak of a disease that seems to defy efforts to halt its spread.
The deadly H5N1 virus first surfaced in Asia but appears to be spreading quickly to the West. Russia confirmed more bird flu cases in poultry on Monday, further raising fears the disease could spread across Europe on the wings of migratory birds.
The European Union was poised on Tuesday to ban all imports of captive wild birds after a parrot died of the H5N1 strain in Britain.
More dead birds have also been found and taken for tests in Germany, Croatia, Hungary and Portugal as suspect cases multiplied.
Indonesia's Health Ministry said on Tuesday testing confirmed that a man who died in September was positive for bird flu. A total of seven people have been confirmed infected with H5N1.
The three survivors included two members of an extended family, but both had come into contact with dead chickens, Hariadi Wibisono, a senior official at the ministry, said when asked if human-to-human transmission might have occurred.
Asia is seen as the likely source of a pandemic arising from human transmission of the disease and health officials are becoming increasingly jittery as more cases of infection occur ahead of winter, when the virus seems to thrive.
In China's latest outbreak, hundreds of farm geese died in the eastern province of Anhui, Noureddin Mona, of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, told Reuters.
He said China's Ministry of Agriculture had told him on Monday 2,100 birds had been infected, 550 had died and 45,000 had been culled.
"We are highly concerned about this," he said of the outbreak, adding that the area had been sealed off at a radius of three miles (five km). He said there were no suspected cases of human infection.
China's sheer size and its attempts to conceal the SARS epidemic in 2003 have prompted fears among some experts that it has had more bird flu cases than officially recorded.
But experts and UN officials said they believe China is better prepared and more open than in 2003.
"I think that, now, China is unlike (it was) during SARS," Mona said, referring to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. "They are highly concerned and have no option but to report."
MUST DO MORE FOR ASIA
The H5N1 strain first surfaced in 1997 in Hong Kong and re-appeared in South Korea in 2003. It has since spread throughout much of East and Southeast Asia, infecting 122 people and killing 62. Millions of poultry have been culled.
The World Health Organisation has said the H5N1 strain is endemic in poultry in China and across much of Asia, and it might only be a matter of time before it develops the ability to pass easily from human to human.
If that happens, millions of people could die and economies come to a halt as nations halt travel and curb trade to limit its spread and deal with the sick.
Some health experts are demanding more be done to halt the spread of the disease.
The U.N. food agency's head said the world must focus on Asia, and on stopping the virus passing between birds.
"Too much time has gone by and even now we seem to focus more on addressing a possible pandemic which is spread from human to human," Jacques Diouf, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, told Reuters in an interview in Canada.
He said the FAO had helped develop a $175 million strategy to control H5N1 and had received pledges of $30 million in aid -- but donors had not yet handed over a single cent.
Many Asian nations lack the resources to set up effective monitoring networks to detect outbreaks in time, much less possess public health systems to cope with large numbers of sick people.
Some health experts worry Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation, is not showing enough urgency in tackling bird flu, especially in culling chickens. The government has defended its response, saying for example that it does not have enough money to compensate farmers.
Vietnam, where 41 people have died of bird flu, is considering rules that would ban the raising and trading of live poultry in urban areas as well as the sale of a traditional pudding made from the raw blood of ducks and geese. (Additional reporting by Chris Buckley in Beijing, Ho Binh Minh in Hanoi; David Ljunggren in Ottawa and Aleksandras Budrys in Moscow)
. Oct. 25 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. officials are considering new measures to monitor whether migratory birds arriving next spring will be the first to carry the avian influenza to the nation.
The influenza working group of the U.S. Agriculture and Interior Departments has urged the expansion of bird testing beyond Alaska to other U.S. states and territories, said Christopher Brand, a wildlife biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, in a telephone interview Oct. 20. The recommendations weren't formally announced, Brand said.
Brand, who is a member of the group, said it also called for studies of bird-disease outbreaks for signs of the virus, called H5N1; programs to sample ducks and geese caught by hunters for the virus; inspections of backyard ponds for pet ducks; and testing of wetlands for signs of the virus in water.
``Now that we have evidence of H5N1 in Europe, we need to look at the potential for infected migratory birds to come down from northern Europe,'' Brand, 55, said. The group estimated the cost of the proposed measures at $10 million for next year.
The proposal is among precautions that many flu experts say are prudent as the U.S. seeks to prevent a deadly human flu pandemic potentially akin to the 1918-19 Spanish flu, which killed about 50 million people in 18 months.
Wild migratory birds such as emperor geese have become a focal point for debate. Concern about the spread of the virus among migratory fowl has grown since April, when more than 6,000 wild birds were reported dead from the virus in the Qinghai Lake region of China.
Potential to Mutate
Government officials in the U.S. and other countries say wild birds possibly could spread the H5N1 virus worldwide. It already has infected at least 118 Asians, of whom 61 died, according to the World Health Organization. Human victims are believed to have come into contact with excrement or blood from infected domestic birds such as chickens.
Researchers worry that the virus has the potential to mutate at some time into a form that people could transmit to one another, putting millions at risk. That's because people don't have a natural immune system defense against H5N1 as they do for the strains of flu that circulate annually.
Scientists say they expect the virus to mutate into a form contagious among people though they don't expect that to happen this year or next. The greater threat is wild birds' transmitting the virus more widely, allowing them to infect domestic poultry and putting at risk a small number of people who come in contact with them.
Migrate Here
``It is possible for an infected bird to migrate here,'' said Nicholas Throckmorton, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, which protects birds and their habitats in the U.S., in a telephone interview Oct. 19. ``The likelihood that will happen this year is very small. We need to be extra vigilant next year.''
The growing wariness of wild birds alarms some naturalists who say avian flu may be spreading through trade -- both legal and covert -- in domestic fowl.
``The patterns of spread are not consistent with the timing and direction of movements of wild birds,'' BirdLife International, a conservation group based in Cambridge, England, said in a statement Oct. 20.
The group said it fears that health officials in some countries might attempt to cull wild birds.
Stressed Birds
``Any such attempts could spread the virus more widely, as survivors disperse to new places, and healthy birds become stressed and more prone to infection,'' BirdLife said.
China, Romania and other nations are already destroying infected domestic fowl in regions with avian flu. More than 140 million poultry worldwide have been lost, Markos Kyprianou, the European Union's commissioner for health and consumer protection, told in the EU in September.
The EU may ban imports of pet birds after H5N1 was found in a South American parrot that died in quarantine in the U.K., Kyprianou said yesterday.
The degree to which wild birds are a risk isn't wholly clear, said Chris Feare, a 63-year-old zoologist who serves as a consultant to the Sandy, England-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
The virus appears to kill or cripple birds rapidly and prevent them from migrating, Feare said in a telephone interview Oct. 20.
``We have to admit that recent outbreaks of avian flu in Turkey and Romania do follow a migration route from Russia,'' Feare said. ``That might just be a coincidence.''
Entry Point
In Alaska, considered the most likely U.S. point of entry for the bird flu virus because of the state's proximity to Russia where bird flu has been found, state and federal officials say 12,000 wild birds have been tested since 1998. No evidence of H5N1 virus was discovered.
``We'll have sampling going forward, going into 2006,'' said Bruce Woods, the federal agency's spokesman in Anchorage, Alaska, in a telephone interview Oct. 19. The tests to date have involved 10 species: Pacific black brant; emperor goose; northern pintail; Steller's eider; rock, dunlin, western and sharptail sandpipers; black turnstone, and bar-tailed godwit.
The danger that birds might carry the virus into Alaska may be greater next year, beginning in March, Throckmorton said -- because by then, birds will have gone south, mixed with birds from Europe and Asia, and returned.
Brand, the U.S. Geological Survey biologist, said species that are likely to be monitored in the eastern U.S. include the snow goose and Canada goose. To test for the virus, researchers take blood and execratory tract samples from trapped birds.
``People shouldn't be scared of birds,'' said Susan Lieberman, a 54-year-old zoologist who heads the global species program of Gland, Switzerland-based World Wildlife Fund International, in a telephone interview Oct. 20. ``But if you find a dead bird, you should not go out of your way to handle it.''
JAKARTA, Oct 25 (Reuters) - The U.N. food agency hopes to start sending teams across Indonesia's main island of Java from late next month to test backyard chickens for bird flu to reduce the rate of infection and stamp out viral hot spots.
Peter Roeder, an animal health officer heading an emergency team from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said on Tuesday the aim was to develop a rapid response to infection that could involve culling birds or vaccination.
Underscoring the tough task ahead for animal health workers who will go house to house searching for infected backyard poultry, Roeder said 30 million households in Indonesia were raising around 200 million chickens.
Concern about the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu centres on scientists' fears it might mutate into a form that passes easily among humans, sparking a pandemic that could kill millions.
"We will be focusing on Java and hotspots within Java. The whole idea is to reduce the rate of infection ... and then identify pockets of infection and knock those out hopefully, progressively over a period of time," he said in an interview.
"When you are looking at control of a major transboundary animal disease like this, it can look so daunting you don't even bother to get started. It's a matter of getting started and then you find you start to make progress and then things snowball."
In announcing formation of the team on Monday, the FAO said there still seemed to be a lack of awareness in rural and suburban Indonesia about the threat posed by bird flu.
There have been seven confirmed cases of bird flu in humans in Indonesia since July, comprising four deaths and three people who were sickened but who have largely recovered.
Java is where most of the positive and suspected human cases of bird flu have emerged but it is also home to more than 120 million people and vast quantities of backyard chickens.
Some health experts worry Indonesia is not showing enough urgency in tackling bird flu, especially in culling chickens. Indonesia has said it would cull where necessary.
Roeder said resistance from local communities to slaughtering livestock was not unusual in the developing world.
"We are still hoping that culling will be one element of the strategy that is adopted," he said.
"How we can implement that, to what extent we will need to implement it and to what extent it can be combined with vaccination is something we now need to negotiate with district authorities and ... community representatives."
THAI SCIENTISTS TO HELP
Roeder said he hoped to get experts to Indonesia to begin training in the second week of November.
"That's training of trainers who will then go out and train a cascade of other people and mobilise from the district level. We're hoping that by the end of November we will have the first teams trained and doing testing in the field," he said.
In addition, a team of Thai scientists would be coming to Indonesia to share their experiences, he said.
Local disease control centres would be established in the Java cities of Bandung, Yogyakarta, Malang and Bogor, where there were already laboratories, he added.
More than 60 people have died from bird flu in Southeast Asia. The virus has also been moving steadily from Asia into birds in Europe since re-emerging in South Korea in 2003.
The virus has been found in poultry in 23 provinces out of 33 in Indonesia's sprawling archipelago, killing more than 10 million domesticated birds. Indonesia's poultry industry had 850 million chickens on top of the backyard variety, Roeder said.
Despite growing publicity about bird flu in Indonesia, Roeder said he had been told the FAO would be able to find enough people to carry out door-to-door testing.
It would not take long for a deadly bird flu outbreak to take a toll on the Australian economy.
Confirmation that the virus could pass from human to human could convulse the world's financial system, disrupt trade and stifle Australia's economic expansion.
Tourism and transport would be immediate casualties because overseas travellers would stay at home.
The scale of Australia's tourism export trade - worth almost $22billion a year or 13 per cent of exports - means economic growth and employment would suffer, particularly in regional areas. Consumer and business confidence would also be affected, with consequences for spending and investment.
A deadly flu outbreak would alter consumer behaviour and many activities, and purchases would be replaced with alternatives. For example, if a flu outbreak slashed international travel, other parts of the transport and tourism industry would benefit from growth in domestic tourism as people substituted a holiday overseas for one within Australia.
The economic impact on Australia would become far worse if domestic cases were registered.
The SARS crisis in mid-2003 was a bellwether of the economic harm that could result from an outbreak of bird flu.
The AMP's chief economist, Shane Oliver, said growth in two advanced economies hit by SARS - Hong Kong and Singapore - collapsed by about 10 per cent, despite a small number of confirmed cases.
Modelling by an economist at the Australian National University, Warwick McKibbin, showed SARS cost the global economy $40billion. Even a mild outbreak of bird flu could cost the world "hundreds of billions", he said.
The Dutch bank ING warned that "large swathes of economic activity could simply cease" and that fear of infection would result in the greatest economic damage.
An economist with HSBC, John Edwards, said a flu epidemic would strike at the connections on which the whole global economy depended.
There would be mayhem on global financial markets as investors reacted to the likely changes to consumer behaviour, he said. "News of a flu epidemic would trigger a rapid global sell-off of bonds and equities and a flight into cash."
The ANZ's chief economist, Saul Eslake, said high household debt and the big current account deficit meant the economy was less well prepared to cope with external shocks than at the time of the Asian crisis in 1997 or the US recession and terrorist attacks in 2001.
He believed the Government would have to bolster the economy with public spending, potentially sending the Commonwealth into deficit.
Dr Oliver said the economic damage would also depend on how long an outbreak lasted.
"If it were to continue beyond six months then you would see problems with people servicing their loans … and then there is trouble for the banks and that sort of thing. If the outbreak lasted for a year then you would run into lasting troubles."
ZAGREB, Oct 24 (Reuters) - Croatia said on Monday it would cull more poultry after finding two dead wild swans in a rural eastern area where bird flu was first detected last week.
Mate Brstilo, who heads the national committee for bird flu prevention, said the two swans were from the same flock and were confirmed to have the H5-type avian influenza virus.
Croatia confirmed its first bird flu case on Friday with six dead swans. Test results from Britain were expected this week, which should determine if the strain of the virus is the lethal H5N1 that has killed more than 60 people in Asia since 2003.
Commenting on the latest dead swans, Brstilo told a news conference: "It's the same flock and the fish ponds are in the same area, so we don't see it as a new case." He said earlier the flock was quite big and new cases were possible.
Agriculture ministry said that on Monday a wild swan displaying odd behaviour typical of infected birds was spotted in northeastern Croatia, near the border with Hungary.
"He is alive and we're monitoring him. It seems he is not able to fly," the ministry's spokesman said.
Croatia's first confirmed outbreak was found in six dead wild swans at the Grudnjak fish pond. The new swans were found at Nasice pond, some five km (three miles) away.
Brstilo said poultry in the area would be culled and farmers had been ordered to keep poultry indoors.
Some 13,000 birds in around 500 farms and rural households near Grudnjak pond were killed at the weekend.
Prime Minister Ivo Sanader said the farmers -- many poor and dependent on their poultry for a living -- would be compensated "at the market price" with a total of one million kuna ($162,000).
"We have done everything in our power to prevent the virus from spreading to domestic poultry and to avoid major economic damage," Brstilo said.
"So far we have not detected any suspicious case in domestic poultry, which is encouraging," he added.
The Croatian agriculture ministry halted exports of poultry to European Union countries. Italy has already banned imports of live poultry from Croatia, Romania and other Balkan countries.
The lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu has been detected in Romania, which shares the Danube waterway with Croatia, Turkey and in an exotic wild bird imported and quarantined in Britain.
Zoologists say the Danube is a natural pathway for some species of migratory birds moving west and south for the winter. The birds may have been in contact with the most recent avian flu virus to the east.
Even though Thai Airways International has not scored highly in rankings of the world's favourite airlines in recent years, the national carrier believes it is second to none when it comes to hygiene.
This attribute should bode well for THAI now that many parts of the world are entering a state of panic over the resurgence of bird flu.
While most other airlines have yet to highlight the issue, THAI has come out strongly to reassure flyers that its passenger cabins are insulated from the deadly virus that has recently reached Europe, apparently spread from Asia by migrating birds.
The airline spends six million baht a year on its ``Most Hygienic In-cabin Environment'' programme, which covers almost every inch of its aircraft, not just cabin walls and floors, but the equipment it uses, the food and drinks it serves and that air that passengers breathe.
THAI executives want to spread the message that the airline's hygienic standards exceed the levels set by global agencies such as the World Health Organisation or Thailand's Ministry of Public Health.
The airline is prepared to take the preventive measures to higher levels on any emerging signs from its monitoring system, said an executive at the crisis management operation centre (CMOC), a body set up at THAI to deal with crisis issues.
Last Friday, acting president Somchainuk Engtrakul signed an order to create another executive-level task force to co-ordinate efforts of all related departments to guard against the bird flu.
When asked if the creation of the task force was an overreaction, especially when the airline already has several preventive measures in place, he responded, ``No, we are not overreacting to the bird flu concerns but rather taking more precautions so that parties dealing with us can feel fully rest assured.''
In fact, the airline cannot afford to lose passenger confidence due to the bird flu panic at this time of the year, the start of the holiday travel season when airlines earn enough money to offset lower revenue from low-season traffic.
``People are highly sensitive about this kind of issue (bird flu), especially the Japanese, so the sooner we address it the more confidence they will have in us,'' added Vasing Kittikul, THAI's executive vice-president for commercial affairs.
To illustrate the airline's proactive approach to guard against the spread of the bird flu and other diseases, the airline last June began to use better air filters on its entire fleet of 88 aircraft.
It replaced the Hepa (high efficiency particle arrester) system previously used and still in use by other airlines with the new True Hepa filters.
True Hepa is a high-performance air filter that is used in operating rooms of major hospitals worldwide. It can prevent the spread of disease, bacteria, dust, mold and vapour, with the ability to catch viral particles as small as 0.1 microns, or by 99.999% of all airborne contaminants.
THAI's flight and cabin crews, now numbering 3,000, also receive vaccinations annually in December and January to protect them from contracting pneumonia.
The company began the pneumonia vaccination programme four years ago and this year's vaccinations will be given next month as a preventive measure for the benefit of passengers.
In addition, flight and cabin crews receive vaccinations against meningococcal meningitis, which is spreading in Delhi and Bombay, two cities to which the airline flies.
THAI executives pointed out that 36 areas in the passenger cabin are subject to special routine cleaning.
For instance, the seats are replaced every month. Reusable items such as blankets are thoroughly cleaned, disinfected and sterlised after use, and the interior of each aircraft is sprayed with disinfectant prior to departure.
Possible bird flu cases may have been discovered on the territories of Germany and Slovenia.
Germany is about to test 25 wild migratory ducks and geese found dead near a lake in a West region of the country.
Slovenia will also perform tests on a dead swan found near the border with Austria.
Fears of a mass outspread of the disease in the EU are rising, especially after two member countries - the UK and Sweden have announced cases of avian flu. While Sweden has confirmed that the virus on its territory is not of the deadly type, Britain's test results still haven't come through.
The EU has already banned poultry import from Romania, Russia, Thailand and Turkey, after the countries confirmed outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 strain. Such measures would be imposed on Croatia, if the bird flu detected there on Saturday turns out to be of the deadly strain.
About 120 people worldwide have been diagnosed with the H5N1 strain since 2003, leading to 60 deaths.
Experts fear H5N1 could mutate into a virus which spreads easily among humans, creating a pandemic that might kill tens of millions.
'Is Tamiflu A Prescription For Survival?'